HAROLD A. BASCOM—poet, painter, novelist, and book illustrator—is arguably Guyana’s pre-eminent playwright. By my count, he has written more than fifteen plays and five works of fiction and non-fiction, including the novel Apata, and has mounted art exhibitions in Guyana, New York, and the US State of Georgia, where he currently lives. It is his plays, however—rooted in Caribbean concerns—that have achieved the greatest resonance. A five-time winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature, Bascom has produced dramatic works of remarkable range, attentive to both the folk culture of his native shores and the philosophical and prescient issues of his time.

Critical response to his work has been limited and largely localised, despite the popularity of his performance pieces, which drew substantial audiences during the 1980s and 1990s, particularly after his migration to the United States. This change in geography has made little difference to his output, which remains prolific. His recent work, especially Desperate for Relevance—which was awarded both the Guyana Prize and the Caribbean Prize—exhibits a pronounced philosophical turn, signalling a more introspective writer and lending his drama a broader universality. Desperate for Relevance is a finely crafted play that deserves far greater critical attention, as do many of his other significant works.

The dramatic foil of sorts in Harold Bascom’s Guyana Prize for Literature (2015)–winning play Desperate for Relevance is Sheik Sadeek, the Guyanese novelist of the 1950s and ’60s, whose disaffection is born of barely veiled desperation, jealousy, implicit racial animus, and, above all, fear. This fear is of a particular and familiar kind: the fear that haunts many writers—the ever-nagging spectre of irrelevance and anonymity, a condition which, in the imagination of the literary mind, is akin to inhabiting a circle of Dante’s Inferno.

Dante does indeed reserve such a place for artistes in his epic: the second circle of Hell, where souls condemned for lust, and by extension for wasting their gift, whirl endlessly. Bascom’s play is set in a comparable afterlife, a kind of limbo: a space between conscious dead presence and oblivion, akin to the realm inhabited by Virgil himself. It is an eternal waiting room before the resolution of resurrection or doom. This is not a place of ease or escape, but one of anxiety and turmoil.

Bascom employs an ingenious conceit to determine which characters continue “living” in death and which of the dead die again and disappear. It is a fine metaphor, with a particularly poignant play on the word’ relevance,’ the lack of which proves fatal in the play’s world. For many writers—whose vocation is inseparable from a sense of destiny—there exists a conviction that their works will outlive them, granting a second life in the manner of Shakespeare or Walt Whitman. To be forgotten is, therefore, a second death.

The characters in Desperate for Relevance are mostly dead Caribbean writers, though dancers, painters, and musicians also inhabit this afterworld. It is an exciting imaginative space, populated by figures we might long to encounter. Among the Guyanese are Jan Carew, Martin Carter, Denis Williams, Ivan Van Sertima, and Sheik Sadeek; among the Jamaicans, V. S. Reid, Roger Mais, Louise Bennett, and Andrew Salkey; Trinidadian Samuel Selvon; Barbadian Frank Collymore; and Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. Writers from smaller islands also appear, including Jean Rhys and Phyllis Shand Allfrey of Dominica. The dancer Geoffrey Holder and choreographer-scholar Rex Nettleford make cameos and, incongruously yet delightfully, Ray Charles enters, bringing soul—literally and figuratively—to an already fraught space.

A pithy précis of the play might run thus: a group of dead, canonical Caribbean writers reside in an afterlife resembling Limbo, where their continued existence depends upon whether their works remain relevant on earth. Relevance is closely allied to being read; to be read is life-sustaining. Its antithesis is obscurity, which entails a gradual fading of light and, ultimately, extinction. This fading provokes intense fear among writers whose works are no longer read, most notably Sheik Sadeek.

Sheik is fading. He lacks the signifying brightness of figures such as V. S. Reid or Jan Carew, whose works continue to circulate among the living. Deprived of relevance, Sheik lashes out. He attributes his obscurity to external forces: his work was self-published rather than issued by metropolitan presses in London or New York; others benefitted from lighter skin, class privilege, or institutional pedigree. Hair texture, skin colour, and class designation emerge as determinants of literary success—or at least of literary survival.

These figures are not so much themselves as representations, dispossessed of the human concerns of family, finance, health, and the like. They are shades, in the Homeric sense—distillations of vocation and reputation. Yet Bascom goes further: he arranges them along a spectrum of relevance. Those surrounded by a radiant aura—something like a full-bodied halo—are the most relevant, their works actively consumed by the living. Others glow dimly; some scarcely at all. Those without light are irrelevant and are in danger of disappearing altogether.

To worry about relevance after death is, conceivably, too late, yet the conceit is deeply poignant. Obscurity can haunt the living to the grave—and, as this play suggests, beyond it. Who wishes never to be remembered? To die and then die again in the minds of the living is a uniquely despairing fate. Irrelevance, here, is closely allied with despair, even for the dead.

There is also, embedded in this anxiety, a hint of ecclesiastical vanity: a preoccupation with ethereal recognition that may be antithetical to wisdom itself.

Desperate for Relevance possesses a philosophical density that demands attentive reading. It is allegorical in its central premise, dramatising a problem fundamental to literary creation. The play operates simultaneously on multiple planes that coalesce around its core question: what constitutes success, and to whom must a work be relevant?

We are introduced to Hector Bunyan, a writer who writes primarily for himself. He is content in this, unconcerned with relevance. A postman by trade, Bunyan regards his writing as no more—or less—significant than delivering mail. Both acts serve a purpose; both possess equal salience in his eyes. Alongside him is Amanda Henry, a journalist marked by far less vanity than the dead writers, for whom relevance is no longer an obsession. Like Bunyan, she inhabits the world of the living, as does Writer Man—a ragged, Tiresias-like figure who speaks in enigmas, hinting at deeper truths of the human condition, or perhaps merely madness.

Amanda Henry functions as a Cassandra-like presence, a modern soothsayer whose prophetic insight plays a crucial role in solving the mysterious disappearance of a Brazilian girl, as well as in rescuing the fading Sheik Sadeek from the terminal dimming of irrelevance.

The play’s subtitle—A Surreal Drama of Dead Caribbean Writers Bound in a Curious Hereafter—is aptly chosen, given the strange, magical, and often humorous events that unfold. The drama is at once serious and playful, suffused with pathos and moments of genuine theatrical delight. The dialogue is often witty and quick, carrying the pacing forward with the necessary alacrity.

Ultimately, Desperate for Relevance is a play about representation. Its allegories are potent, particularly in their interrogation of how writerly success is measured. As the play suggests, relevance may have little to do with readership alone and much to do with the writer’s own sense of fulfilment and integrity as a creator. Relevance, in this sense, is not an objective criterion but a deeply subjective one.

One of the play’s most striking achievements is its successful melding of disparate narrative strands and characters into a coherent and affecting whole. This convergence is handled with considerable skill, culminating in a resolution that is both poignant and satisfying.